About this Book

Book Summary

The breathtaking love story of a young woman's betrayal, a haunting portrait of the extraordinary beauty and inexorable violence of a divided Ireland.

In what will surely be his most acclaimed novel yet, Moran carries us to the harbor towns of southern Ireland. Una Moss is a bright, young medical student struggling for independence from the world of her family's secret loyalties. Aidan Ferrel is the man who wins her love, the stranger she chooses to trust. Water, Carry Me is the story of a singular love pitted against political passion--the chronicle of a young woman's journey from innocence to betrayal, across the vivid brightness and darkness that is the heartbreaking landscape of her beloved Ireland.

"Thomas Moran . . . can immerse you utterly in whatever moment he chooses to describe." --The New York Times Book Review

Chapter One

What if the world turned wrong one day and the deep sea gave up its dead?

What would we of the land's end spy? A hundred thousand pale corpses, bobbing like fishermen's floats in the green swell? Several millions, from chain-mailed Norman lords to the black-clad crews of Spanish galleons, from ladies in silk ballgowns who went down on liners to poor Connacht fishermen swept overboard in the lonely nights by sudden swinging booms? And flaunty yachtsmen, cocksure but capsized by white squalls, the implacable destroyers of pretty boats?

Would the endless waters become a sort of peat bog on which, stepping so carefully, we might walk from here all the way to America? Would the corpses' eyes be open, watching and resentful? Or would they be closed tight as a baby's at the moment of birth?

This isn't a decent vision. It's one I would not have. But it has been with me for years, sometimes asleep and sometimes awake.

Please be aware that this discussion guide may contain spoilers!

From award-winning author Thomas Moran comes the breathtaking story of a
young woman's betrayal, a haunting portrait of the extraordinary beauty and
inexorable violence of a divided Ireland.

Thomas Moran made his impressive literary debut only three years ago with The
Man in the Box, winner of the Book-of-the-Month Club's Stephen Crane Award
for First Fiction. The New Yorker compared The Man in the Box to the
diary of Anne Frank, and the Los Angeles Times compared Thomas Moran to Elie
Wiesel. On the heels of this success came what Booklist predicted would be
"for many. . .the best book of the year." The World I Made for Her
confirmed the depth and breadth of Moran's talent. "Now, to A Farewell to
Arms and The English...

Reviews

Media Reviews

Publishers Weekly

[The] swift-moving narrative is sure to carry the reader in its currents.

Kirkus Reviews

The horror of Irelands never-ending Troubles assumes human form in this vividly dramatic (if ill-proportioned) third novel by the versatile Moran....The very real strengths here are Morans forceful characterizations of the sentient, credibly intelligent Una and the intriguing, soft-spoken Aidan. But the story that Moran plunges his characters into is overfamiliar and marred by an ending that rushes Una to judgment, leaving the sense that there must be even more to her tale than weve been told.

Library Journal

This is a well-crafted, haunting tale filled with very human characters caught in a web much bigger than themselves.

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